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Wednesday, May 21, 2014

MSI unveils their latest Z97 Motherboards and Nightblade barebones PC

At an event in Ho Chi Minh
city, Vietnam - MSI unveiled their latest line up of Z97 boards and the
user-upgradable Nightblade barebones PC. Out of the 26 motherboard SKUs showcased,
23 are gaming models and this clearly establishes the focus for MSI in the
coming year. Henry Lu, Senior Vice President and Founder of MSI opened the
proceedings by saying the PC has been in trouble for the last five years but
despite this, 2013 was the best year for MSI since 2008 and Q1 2014 was even
better – almost double compared to the same period last year.

Henry Lu - MSI Senior Vice-President and
Co-Founder

Ferhad Patel - Intel's Reseller Channel
Organization (AP)

Next up on stage Mr. Tim Lee, SEA/MEA Component Sales Director for MSI
posed an interesting question to the audience, “To build a gaming PC, which two
components would you like to spend your money on the most?”. He was honest
enough to say CPU and GPU as the answer (and not motherboard). “MSI is
concentrating on value for money by cutting a segment into different parts,
allowing you to put that extra money into upgrading your GPU and CPU – both
very important features for a gamer”, he said. Apart from this Tim Lee
emphasised that three features critical to a gamer – Speed (Killer LAN), Sound
(Audio Boost / Creative Sound Blaster Cinema) and Stability (Military Class 4)
are present on all SKUs. Mr. Lee also went into a bit of their R&D
philosophy stating that unlike some of the other manufacturers out there,
they’ve listened to customers rather than competition. For instance, why have
Qualcomm’s Killer LAN NPU on an OC model?

Tim Lee - SEA/MEA Component Sales Director

Maxine Chang - Motherboard Product
Manager

Vincent Hou - Graphics Card Product
Manager

A couple of interesting
features were showcased that are available on select models belonging to all three
of the above segments. Guard Pro for example is a new feature that will reduce
frequency of the CPU if it’s running close to 100 degrees. Another technology
available on some “classic” or blue boards, which is of interest to bit/light
coin miners using USB ASIC solutions, is USB Steel Power. It ensures that these
ASIC devices don’t draw too much power and make the mining unviable. M.2 and
SATA Express ports were also seen on a few yellow boards and so was the Xtreme
Audio DAC powered by the C-Media CM 6631 HD Audio Processor.

Austin Yang - Barebone Product
Marketing

And now we come to the
Nightblade – a barebones PC aimed at DIY gamers. Mr. Austin Yang, Barebone
Product Marketing emphasised that the PC has a small footprint (mini-ITX form
factor) and is well built. To prove it he even asked a model to stand on it.
The PC comes in three SKUs at the moment – Z87, B85 and Z97. What you get is
the board, the case and a PSU. The Z97 variant has a 600 W PSU. The PC
apparently can support cards upto 290mm in length, this includes GTX 780Ti and
R9 290X – but we wonder why anyone would want to put those cards in. The PC
also has OC Genie hardware performance boost which can boost the clock speed of
CPU and Memory up to +15 percent.

For more information about
the product(s), please visit the MSI website (click here).

*Disclosure: An important note, we are just sharing this information to the public, provided by our source. MSI Info / Logos / Photos / Images have respective copyrights.